Rinker Buck > Quotes

“Their only real endowments were soft skills such as a willingness to accept the help of strangers, stubborn practicality, and the ability to live with uncertainty.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Before the Oregon Trail, America was a loosely coordinated land of emerging industrial centers in the Northeast, and a plantation South, with a frontier of hotly contested soil mutating west. Post–Oregon Trail—with a big assist from the Civil War—America was a continental dynamo connected by railroads and the telegraph from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with certain precedents for settlement, statehood, and quickly establishing large commercial cities.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The very idea of wagon travel across the plains might have been indefinitely delayed had it not been for Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, a dreamy but persistent evangelist from the Finger Lakes of New York, who in 1836 became the first white woman to cross the Rockies. Narcissa Whitman is largely forgotten today, but her impact on American history was enormous, and for a time she was one of the most famous women in antebellum America.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“A wave of bipolar disorders and addiction to video games and gambling has also taken a toll on families.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“One of Brown’s best monograph sketches, for example, narrates the tragedy of Charles Stull, a deaf and mute man from Philadelphia who decided to cross the Oregon Trail, alone and on foot, during the peak emigration year of 1852. Stull died of cholera at Castle Creek, just west of Ash Hollow. He was found by the members of a passing wagon train, who examined his body and found $2.75 in his pockets, along with a certificate attesting to his graduation from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Dumb in Philadelphia. I learned from Brown’s account how crowded the trail was that year, and new details about the cholera plagues. Brown also portrayed how early-nineteenth-century educators and philanthropists founded schools for the deaf and circulated beautifully illustrated pamphlets on sign language. Stull was an exemplary product of that era. He was one of the first students at the Philadelphia school for the deaf, and he and his brother, an engraver, published one of the first sign-language manuals, an illustrated broadsheet titled An Alphabet for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. The”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I am an obsessive-compulsive reader and a history junkie. I brake by rote at every historical marker, I buy out museum bookstores, and for years my interest in colonial forts and Shaker villages so exhausted my two children that they are now permanently allergic to the past. I can tell you, right down to the hour, everything that happened at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the first week of July 1863, and each setback that Franklin Roosevelt endured during World War II feels like it happened to me.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Perfectionism was my enemy now.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer, often described as the richest of his generation.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“One of Nick’s better qualities is that his short attention span does not permit him to hold a grudge for more than five minutes.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Okay, son. All I am saying is that sometimes you’re doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You’re not quitting. You just keep going. That’s the pioneer spirit.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Historian Richard Slotkin has shown how the myth of Indian savagery was required to justify the subjugation of the tribes so that their prairie kingdoms could be seized by the Americans crossing the frontier after 1843. But that image, faithfully passed down by purple-sage novels and Hollywood westerns, is wildly inaccurate.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“road ranches” along remote”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The 1836 Whitman-Spalding covered wagon train was the first to go beyond the Rockies and complete the Oregon Trail.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I had never realized before just how tiring and dehydrating long exposure to the wind can be, but this made me feel closer to nature.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“spring. The enormous economic impact of the mule trade and how Oregon Trail traffic stimulated the American economy have been frequently ignored by historians, mostly because it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Senator Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America’s basic means of transportation for a century—wagons and mules. Yes,”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“physically exhilarating, and after the first”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Don looked up from his plate of bacon and eggs with an amused smile.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Don’t think. Just do it.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The original Pikers from Kentucky and Missouri, in the words of pioneer diarist William Audley Maxwell, were considered “of a ‘backwoods’ class,”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Your family consists of the people you are bound by convention to love but learn to ignore.”
― Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure

“families, revealing insights that cannot be found in published histories. Brown doggedly cross-checks information about each grave in emigrant journals, land records, and nineteenth-century newspapers. A lifetime of searching for graves along the Oregon and California trails has also allowed him”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Even more beautiful than the land that we passed, or the months spent camping on the plains, was learning to live with uncertainty.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“wagon trains. Today, the West is still full of such places, creating an interesting political irony. Some of the most conservative, red-state bastions in America—Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho—are the most park-rich states of all, with rodeo corrals, state fairgrounds, and free or inexpensive municipal campgrounds nearly everywhere. Untold millions in tax dollars were spent to build these national assets, and millions of dollars of public funds are spent every year to maintain them. The public corrals and parks measurably improve the quality of life and the local economies. But this region is also the Tea Party belt, where the central ideological pretense of the day is that government is the enemy and that every penny of taxes collected is a political crime.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“My last thought before falling asleep was that we are all a lot more capable of conquering obstacles and fears than we think.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Scholars have now concluded that Buffalo Bill’s famous ride never happened, and in fact he was not a Pony Express rider at all.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“They considered themselves Americans, obligated by birth to accumulate not quality but cash.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Meeker Markers” at important trail junctions.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“When Duane began describing the trail, he handed me a foldout map published by the National”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey